The Pentagon's Bottomless Money Pit

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

A retired Air Force auditor — we’ll call him Andy — tells a story about a thing that happened at Ogden Air Force Base, Utah. Sometime in early 2001, something went wrong with a base inventory order. Andy thinks it was a simple data-entry error. “Someone ordered five of something,” he says, “and it came out as an order for 999,000.” He laughs. “It was probably just something the machine defaulted to. Type in an order for a part the wrong way, and it comes out all frickin’ nines in every field.” Nobody actually delivered a monster load of parts. But the faulty transaction — the paper trail for a phantom inventory adjustment never made — started moving through the Air Force’s maze of internal accounting systems anyway. A junior-level logistics officer caught it before it went out of house. Andy remembers the incident because, as a souvenir, he kept the June 28th, 2001, email that circulated about it in the Air Force accounting world, in which the dollar value of the error was discussed.

Wanted to keep you all informed of the massive inventory adjustment processed at [Ogden] on Wednesday of this week. It isn’t as bad as we first thought ($8.5 trillion). The hit . . . $3.9 trillion instead of the $8.5 trillion as we first thought.

The Air Force, which had an $85 billion budget that year, nearly created in one stroke an accounting error more than a third the size of the U.S. GDP, which was just over $10 trillion in 2001. Nobody lost money. It was just a paper error, one that was caught.

“Even the Air Force notices a trillion-dollar error,” Andy says with a laugh. “Now, if it had been a billion, it might have gone through.”

Years later, Andy watched as another massive accounting issue made its way into the military bureaucracy. The Air Force changed one of its financial reporting systems, and after the change, the service showed a negative number for inventory — everything from engine cores to landing gear — in transit.

Freaked out, because you can’t have a negative number of things in transit, Air Force accountants went back and tried to reverse the mistake. In doing so, they somehow ended up adding more than $4 billion in value to the Air Force’s overall spare-parts inventory in a single month.

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/pentagon-budget-mystery-807276/

[Sherman A1]

1. Years ago at the Grocery Store where I was working

The Pharmacist made hiccup when ordering empty Rx bottles. We normally would get in 6-8 boxes a couple of times each week sizes varied as expected, except in this case the truck backed up with 13 pallets of boxes nicely stretch wrapped of Rx bottles.

Needless to say, the Pharmacist was busy making phone calls to get the authorization to return them to the warehouse and blaming everyone but themselves (she was one of those that knew everything and was never wrong about anything).

I just worked around them and wondered why no one at the warehouse thought for a moment "perhaps there is something wrong with this quantity and maybe we should call the store?" .